Free M3U Playlist Creator & Generator Online

An M3U playlist is a plain text index. It holds no video. What it holds is a list of addresses plus a little metadata about each one, and that is the whole file format: a player reads it top to bottom and turns it into a list of channels.

So you can create M3U playlist files manually in a text editor, if you enjoy counting commas. Most people do not. That is what this application is for: fill in the fields, generate the file, click export.

Fill in the channel name and the stream URL. Those two are the only required fields.

The URL should point at an HLS (.m3u8), DASH (.mpd) or direct media file. Everything after this step is optional, and you can come back to it later.

1. Add a group name to sort channels into categories. Players show these as folders.
2. Add a logo URL if you want an icon beside the channel. PNG and JPG both work in most media players.
3. Set an EPG ID if you use a programme guide, which links the entry to its schedule data.
4. Repeat, or switch to Bulk Add and paste a whole list of URLs at once.
5. Check the preview, then download. You can also open the result directly in the player to confirm it works before saving it anywhere.

Four tags do almost all the work. #EXTM3U opens the file and has to be the first line. #EXTINF precedes every entry, carrying a duration where -1 means an open-ended live stream.

After that come the attributes a player reads for display: tvg-name, tvg-logo, group-title, tvg-id. Then the address itself, alone on the next line.

None of it is proprietary. The output opens instantly in VLC, in an IPTV player, in a set-top box app, in this site's own player, or back in the playlist editor, because every one of those reads the same m3u8 file structure.

Already have the URLs? Paste them into Bulk Add, one per line. Each becomes an entry you can name and reorder afterwards.

Thousands of streams are handled locally in the browser, so nothing is uploaded and there is no limit worth worrying about. Lists that came from somewhere messy usually want a pass through the duplicate remover or the playlist cleaner first.

Then come back and edit what survived: rename entries, reorder them, drop the ones you will never watch, and export a file that is compatible with VLC and with most media players without any conversion step.